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The House of Commons yesterday voted by 365 votes to 187 to hold a UK-wide referendum on changing the voting system next year from first-past-the-post to the alternative vote. The Lib Dems reluctantly voted for the alternative vote, as the most modest of improvements on the current, broken system.

But the party, in the person of Cambridge MP David Howarth, also moved an amendment to leave out ‘an alternative-vote’ and insert ‘a single transferable vote’ – in other words, to ask Parliament to approve an electoral system which would at last reflect the votes cast for parties across the country, as happens in the vast majority of parliamentary democracies.

When the Lib Dem amendment was put to the vote, it secured 69 votes, of which 55 were Lib Dem MPs. So let’s salute the 14 non-Lib Dem MPs who chose to go into the lobby with the Lib Dems in support of a fair voting system. They were: